Stepped up official government attacks on gay men in Indonesia — including the arrest and public humiliation of 141 men at a gay spa in Jakarta on May 22 — were met by pickets at that country’s consulates in New York and San Francisco in the past week.

More than a dozen protesters, mostly from Rise and Resist, demonstrated outside the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia at 5 East 68th Street in Manhattan on the morning of June 5, timed to make the staff there aware of their concerns during business hours.

Luthfi Madjid of the New York-based Satu Pelangi (“One Rainbow”) organization for LGBTQ Indonesians, hand-delivered a group letter to President Joko Widodo calling on him to “disband the West Java anti-LGBT unit and devote police resources to protecting minorities from vigilante groups,” including in the Aceh province. There, Sharia law is being imposed on gay people and two gay men were caned brutally in public this past month.

The activists also drew attention to the recent forced HIV testing of 14 gay men arrested in Surabaya. The fact that anti-LGBTQ persecution has spread from the fundamentalist Aceh to the rest of the world’s largest Muslim nation has caused international alarm. Read more via Gay City News